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Why do some communities have straight streets and others have curving streets, and even different kinds of curving streets?  It depends on when the community was laid out.  Community street patterns have evolved through four phases: ·       Organic ·       Grid ·       Picturesque landscape ·       20th century curvilinear or warped grid ·       Loops and lollipops I will explain and illustrate. Organic For much of human history towns grew organically.  As settlements became villages, streets “going this way or that” were added incrementally as needed.  Paths turned into streets, then clusters of buildings were erected along the irregularly located streets, and the rest of the town or city grew around them.   Central London and Boston have elements of organic street layout. The best (and really only) example of organic street layout in the towns along the Q is central Downers Grove. Having initially grown as an informal settlement along the Southwest Trail (long before the “Q” railroad tracks arrived), Downers Grove still contains a few square blocks of organic street pattern, particularly along Curtiss Street.  Subsequent population growth and incorporation as a municipality resulted in imposition of a gridded street pattern through the early 20th century. Grid The grid, namely a regularized pattern of streets meeting at right angles, characterized American cities, rural communities and suburbs right up until World War II.  Towns along the Q are no exception.   Grided street pattern is nearly as old as civilization itself, at least dating back to 2,000 bce in Pakistan.  The pattern was legitimatized and popularized by the Hippodamus, a follower of Pythagoras (think Pythagorean theorem) in the rebuilding of the Greek city of Miletus in about 400 bce.   William Penn established the first major rectangular checkerboard urban street pattern in North America with the platting of Philadelphia in 1680. There were rational and practical reasons for widespread use of the grid system.  It made it easy to lay out towns in advance of settlement. Lots could be easily and conveniently surveyed and numbered for sale, ultimately resulting in the “standard” urban lot size of 25 feet wide by 100 feet deep. Legal disputes over lot boundaries were minimized.   The system maximized the number of houses that could be located on a given street.   Philosophically speaking, use of the grid reflected the order, regularity, balance and predictability most admired by the rationalists of the early 19th century, described by one analyst as the “triumph of reason over the wanton riot of nature." The platting of Chicago in 1830 brought the grid to the shore of Lake Michigan, and that grid spread westward through most of the towns along the Q as new communities were planted along the railroad, and populations grew.  Berwyn and Cicero represent the logical extension of the Chicago grid. Picturesque Landscapes Mid-19th century objection to imposing order on nature was reflected in the work of landscape architects, Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted being among the most notable. Parks were looked upon as a refuge from the anti-natural imposition of human activity on natural settings.  At that time, many upscale suburban residential communities were conceived as retreats from the evils of the city, imposition of order upon nature being one of them. So it was that the developers of Riverside called upon Olmsted, who had recently laid out Central Park in New York, to design a street layout harmonious with the natural environment rather than destroying it with the imposition of the urban gridded street pattern. Among the Towns along the Q, Riverside, Clarendon Hills, and (to a lesser extent) Hinsdale, incorporated the gently curving street patterns.  Riverside does have pockets of grid street pattern, in places where the 1868 era Riverside Improvement Company was not able to acquire the land.  Clarendon Hills was laid out with gently curving streets, but the northwest quadrant was replatted in the 1920s with a warped grid pattern. Hinsdale’s original 1866 plat (two years after the CB&Q line was opened) plat involved gridded streets, but developer William Robbins employed landscape architect H.W.S. Cleveland to layout parklike streets in the appropriately named Park Addition to Hinsdale.  In the 1920s, the George W. Maher designed Hinsdale’s Woodlands Addition incorporated gently curving parklike streets. Likewise Downers Grove’s Denburn Woods incorporates a parklike picturesque landscape aspect. Curvilinear and Warped Grid By the 1920s, when automobiles had become commonplace in the suburbs, new street patterns were introduced with the purpose of separating pedestrians from fast traffic, and to a distinguish between arterial streets and local streets. Though nearly all new 1920s subdivisions along the Q were laid out with gridded streets, theorists were introducing prototype local street layouts that encouraged cautious driving and discouraged use of local streets for all but local access. The traditional grid was modified to introduce gentle curves limiting motorists forward sight-lines, with irregular intersections compelling motorists to watch for cross-traffic, and indirect street access to discourage non-local motorists from “cutting-through” the neighborhoods. Federal Housing Administration guidelines (that ultimately became requirements) enacted in the late 1930s, mandated this type of street layout for further suburban development, ending the use of the straight grid for future subdivisions. Loops and Lollipops In a further effort to minimize non-local automobile traffic, maximize pedestrian safety, and engender a generalized sense of safety and security, street layout practice has evolved to the “loops and lollipops” format featuring streets looping through residential neighborhoods, generally with fewer connections to the surrounding arterial street network.  “Lollipops” are cul-de-sacs, namely dead-end spurs off the looping streets with round auto turnarounds at the ends giving them a lollipop shape, and have the effect of excluding all but local automobile travel.   The street layout has proved popular with suburbanites in bringing about both a real and perceived sense of privacy, safety and serenity as well as a heightened sense of neighborhood sociability.  Oak Brook, depicted here, hosts the most distinctively developed loops and lollipops street pattern. Evolution Everything in life evolves to adapt to ever changing conditions.  Towns along the Q street patterns have evolved through the four phases more or less (with the exception of the picturesque suburbs layout) on a time-continuum in direct relation to the distance from the train stations.  We can only imagine what street layouts will characterize communities in the future.

Mysterious things were happening in a forested area north of Naperville early in 1942.  Barbed wire fencing was erected around the abandoned Civilian Conservation Corp camp at McDowell Grove, along Raymond Drive, three miles north of downtown Naperville. Back in 1930, the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County bought scenic land along the West Branch of the DuPage River from Alexander McDowell for conservation and recreational purposes.  In 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Great Depression era federal “alphabet agency” established a camp in the newly established forest preserve to simultaneously improve the park’s recreational amenities and provide employment during hard economic times.  200-300 men were housed in six barracks buildings along the river bank at the east end of McDowell Road.  The camp operated until the late 1930s. As the camp activities were winding down, the dark clouds of war were gathering over Europe, thousands of miles away.  The island nation of Great Britain developed new electronic technology whereby radio waves were reflected off far-away objects (in that case approaching enemy aircraft) to detect location, direction and velocity of the incoming aircraft.  The technology was named Radio Detection and Ranging, or radar for short.   The new radar technology would provide decisive in the island nation’s defense during the 1940 Battle of Britain. The United States military, aware of radar’s importance, collaborated with the British in making radar available in North America. United States’ sudden entry into World War II as a combatant nation following the December, 1941, bombing of Pearl Harbor, raised the urgency of implementing the radar technology in the U.S.   To that end, in early 1942, the United States Army Signal Corps commandeered the former McDowell Grove CCC camp, and in twenty-eight days transformed it into a radar training school.  Additional barracks were added, and a nearly four-story building erected to house radar equipment.  The structure reportedly incorporated a false roof and walls that could be closed during the day to conceal the radar apparatus. Civilian students were recruited from area colleges and universities, Illinois Institute of Technology in particular, and promised draft deferments and or post-graduation enlistments, in exchange for participation in the program.  Once in the program, the new Camp McDowell residents were trained in how to maintain and operate radar systems so they could instruct others in the field. Though it was plainly evident that some kind of war related military activity was being conducted, the “secret” Camp McDowell existed side-by-side with the fishing and picnicking activities in the remainder of the McDowell Grove Forest Preserve.    Strict secrecy was maintained with regard to exactly what military activity was going on.  The barbed-wire fence protected the perimeter. Cameras were prohibited from the radar school and radar manuals and textbooks never left the radar building, not even to be taken to the students’ barracks.  A trustworthy local resident was recruited to surreptitiously dispose of camp refuse. Then in late 1943, the secret became mysteriously secret.   The school requested from the DuPage Forest Preserve district permission to prohibit public use of McDowell Grove in its entirety, stating: “the movement of any individual in the neighborhood of the Camp is liable to put suspicion on the part of the Guards of Camp McDowell; and in order to forestall any incident which may involve misunderstanding, and even shooting...” Further permission was requested “to use the first Island for handgrenade [sic] instruction, obstacle races and military drill.” Clearly something more than radar training was intended. In 1942, the United States had established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as an independent (of any individual branch of the armed forces) agency, charged with leading the U.S. espionage agents during the war. In fact, at war’s end, the agency would evolve into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).  OSS needed a remote (from existing facilities in Virginia) to train personnel to operate radios and in other aspects of espionage like weaponry, demolition work, field craft, and close combat skills. OSS needed operatives who could not only complete daring covert missions but also communicate in the field, including behind enemy lines.  Participants in the program have been acknowledged as prototypes of modern intelligence agents. OSS absorbed the radar school and designated it cryptically as “Area M,” focusing specifically on communications training.  Notable among the several hundred men trained at Area M were Nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans, who were recruited from the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a unit comprised entirely of soldiers of Japanese descent, whose Japanese language skills were valuable in espionage work, and assigned to Camp McDowell to continue their military training.  One recruit recollected that “On December 29, 1943 the group left Camp Shelby [Mississippi] under the cloak of darkness. Traveling by Pullman, we arrived [at] Camp McDowell, Naperville, Ill. on January 3, 1944.” The transition from radar to clandestine communications school was deliberately obscured.  Despite earlier secrecy measures, existence of the radar school had been pretty well known in the surrounding community.  So as to respect the greater security need of the communications school, residents and employees of the OSS run camp were instructed to say that they simply “worked for the radar school.” Following the end of World War II combat, Camp McDowell was decommissioned and returned to civilian use.  Once again, the forested banks of the West Branch of the Du Page River became a venue for relaxed boating, fishing, picnics and relaxation.   Less than a decade later, Naperville would again host a vital national defense site. Less than three miles from McDowell Grove, a site was established for launch of Nike missiles.   But that is a story for another day.

In the wake of Chicago’s city-wide fire in 1871, many parts of the city were declared to be within “fire limits,” namely zones where new construction could only be with the use of brick or stone.   Further use of wood construction, it was felt, would leave the city vulnerable to another massive conflagration reminiscent of 1871. In fact, Chicago did indeed experience a second major fire in 1874.  An insatiable demand for brick arose. The situation caught the attention of William Greggs, a Philadelphia brickmaker, who promptly relocated to the Chicago area to take advantage of the huge business opportunity.   Gregg identified clay deposits along the CB&Q at Bushville, twenty miles west of Chicago, west of Clarendon Hills and east of Downers Grove, and acquired a tract of land for quarrying, brick manufacture, and worker housing.  CB&Q had established a milk stop at Bushville at the time of the line’s opening in 1864, where dairy farmers brought cans of raw milk to the railroad platform in the morning, and retrieved the empty milk cans in the afternoon. By the spring of 1872, Gregg began manufacturing bricks under the name of the Excelsior Pressed Brick Manufacturing Company.   Gregg reportedly employed 120 people, mostly immigrants, who were housed on the property in the newly established community of Gregg’s.   Gregg boasted that the new kilns had the capacity to produce 70,000 bricks per day, using a triple pressure brick machine of Gregg’s own invention.  Using this new method of extrusion Gregg claimed his bricks could withstand 100,000 pounds of pressure without cracking. An often-retold legend is that Gregg chose the location because the site was the highest point on the CB&Q railroad between Chicago and the Mississippi River (which is true) and that shipping cost would be lower because the carloads of bricks would be pulled downhill to Chicago.  It is a fun story, but lacking any relationship to transportation economics, then or now.   The simple fact was that the land was available and was underlaid with the grade of clay suitable for brickmaking.  The clay quality was sufficiently satisfactory for other brick makers to also locate in the vicinity. Greggs sponsored a CB&Q excursion train in October, 1872, a year after the great fire, to show off his brickmaking operation.   The excursion passenger list read like a who’s who of industry, Chicago and the western suburbs.  Brick people from Philadelphia, Ecuador and Chile were in attendance, along with Thomas Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Thomas Biddle, a prominent Philadelphia financier, Chicago businessman and socialite David Gage (much more about Gage in future posts), William Robbins, the founder of Hinsdale, architects, members of the Chicago Board of Trade, and many other persons prominent in the business community.  Gregg spoke glowingly of his expected production increase to 140,000 bricks per day, and his newly patented triple-pressure brick machine. Despite William Gregg’s optimism and high-profile promotion, the business experienced difficulties. Production likely never reached the levels described to the 1872 visitors.   Gregg sought external financing from Philadelphia investors, and executed a mortgage on the property in December, 1873.    Just two years later, in 1875, Excelsior defaulted on its loan and Gregg’s Philadelphia financiers initiated foreclosure proceedings.  By the end of 1875, Excelsior had ceased operation.   Gregg himself left Chicago and died in 1888.   Other companies reportedly continued brick manufacture in the area until 1900. In 1872, Gregg built a brick house on the property, ostensibly for himself, as a practical demonstration of the quality of Excelsior bricks.  It would appear that Gregg never actually lived in the house, preferring the comfort of the newly reconstructed (after the 1871 fire) Palmer House Hotel in downtown Chicago. Following the demise of Excelsior Brick, the house went on to have a varied and sometimes less than savory history.  It hosted a residence, a mattress factory, a speakeasy, a gambling venue, a funeral parlor, a recreation center, a home for priests and nuns of nearby Holy Trinity Catholic Church, and a church community center.   During its nefarious days as speakeasy and gambling parlor, it is said that Al Capone and baseball players spent leisurely evenings there in the 1920s, with gambling stakes as high as $10,000 (upwards to $200,000 in current day value).  Since 1981 it has been preserved as the Westmont Historical Society Museum. With the end of brick manufacturing at the turn of the twentieth century, the quarry and kiln workers drifted away and the vicinity became an unincorporated quasi-frontier settlement.  Residences were described as “bungalows or shacks.”   The community had no paved streets, electricity, gas, telephones, piped water or sewers.   Though some households had private wells, the public water supply largely consisted of a single public pump.   For nearly two decades, the little community of Gregg’s had a vague and bleak future.   All that changed, however, when the A.T. MacIntosh Company, a prominent real estate developer, bought up the Gregg’s property and transformed it into Westmont, the vibrant town along the Q that we recognize today.

Hooray for Hollywood.  That song featured in the 1937 movie Hollywood Hotel celebrates Hollywood, California, the glitz and glamor home of movie-making.   So what does “Tinseltown” have to do with the towns along the Q? Hollywood historian Gregory Paul Williams, in his book The Story of Hollywood: An Illustrated History describes the connection.  In the mid-1880s, Daeida Wilcox, who had grown up in western Ohio, and her husband Harvey Wilcox began subdividing 120 acres of land northwest of Los Angeles.  On one of her trips back to her native Ohio, Daeida, engaged in conversation with a fellow train passenger, Mary Peck.  In answer to the usually asked “oh, where are you from?” question asked of fellow traveler, Peck replied that she and her husband had a country estate near Chicago which they had named Hollywood. In 1880, privileged Chicagoans with the means to do so established suburban retreats away from the heat, soot, and unsanitary conditions in the city.   Walter and Mary Peck did just that, establishing their summer home on land between the Des Plaines River and Salt Creek.  Mary and Walter must have liked their privacy.  Though the property was bisected by the CB&Q railroad, no stop was established there, nor were bridges constructed over the Des Plaines River or Salt Creek there until the early 1890s.  Your author is baffled as to how they gained access to their summer paradise. Daeida and Harvey were smitten with the Hollywood name, and in 1887, filed a plat with the Los Angeles Country recorder’s office using the name that Daeida reportedly heard in the conversation on the train.  In that same year Mary and Walter sold their isolated property west of Riverside.   The first of that land between the Des Plaines and Salt Creek itself would be subdivided early in the 1890s, ultimately becoming the little present-day community of Hollywood – but that is a story for another day.

What is the Q?  The British answer would be people standing in line.  Biblical scholars’ answer is that it would be “the lost gospel.”  A New Yorker’s answer would be that it is the 2nd Ave./Broadway Express subway train to Coney Island.  A pool player would call it the white ball. For our purposes in Chicagoland, it is what we presently know as the BNSF Railway or the Metra BNSF train line between Chicago and Aurora. It got its name as a contraction of the name CB&Q, namely the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad that ran through Chicago’s Western Suburbs beginning in 1864.   Generations of local residents referred to “taking the Q” to downtown Chicago to get to work, or perhaps to shop at Marshall Field’s department store, or to go to the theater.   The CB&Q moniker lasted until 1970, when the company merged with three other railroads to become the Burlington Northern (BN).  BN itself subsequently consolidated with famed (at least in the Judy Garland song) Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway to form the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (BNSF), the name by which we know it today. The CB&Q got its start in 1849 as the Aurora Branch Rail Road, a little branch line off the newly opened (1848) Galena & Chicago Union Rail Road, providing the city of Aurora with a rail connection to Chicago. Both companies expanded to the point where they outgrew each other.  Landlord G&CU cancelled tenant CB&Q’s running rights into Chicago, prompting the need for CB&Q to build its own route between Aurora and Chicago. That route opened in 1864, smack in the middle of the Civil War. So that was the Q – what about the towns?   It was still pretty much frontier territory in 1864.   The first meaningful white settlement had begun about 1830, first as frontier settlements, then as self-sufficient communities.  By 1864, there were only four population clusters along the old Southwestern Trail (as Ogden Avenue was then known). All four were established at about the same time.  Lyons began in 1827 with the opening of David and Bernardus Laughton’s tavern along the Des Plaines River.  Brush Hill (present day Ogden Avenue and York Road) got its start with the Torode saw mill (later the Graue grist mill) in 1836.   In 1832-1833, Pierce Downer and Joseph Naper each founded homesteads and mercantile centers in present day DuPage County. Those four towns anticipated that the new CB&Q railroad line would pass directly through their communities.   The desire of the new railroad to have a route as straight and flat as possible meant that three of the towns got bypassed:  a half mile or so north of both Lyons and Naperville, and about a mile south of Brush Hill.  Only Downer’s Grove found itself directly in the path of the railroad.  Following the end of the Civil War, real estate developers recognized the value of subdividing land along the railroad and began establishing more towns along the Q.